One Year After Flight 103 Blast, Trail Of Evidence Leads To Sweden

December 25, 1989|By Michael Wines, New York Times News Service.

UPPSALA, SWEDEN — A year after a four-pound plastic bomb blew Pan American World Airways Flight 103 out of Scotland`s skies, a chain of luck, toil and sleuthing has led police officers to this university city.

A three-story suburban apartment building is home to Mohammed Abu Talb, a sometime janitor, importer and reseller of Arabic food and videotapes and former husband to a woman named Jamila, who is pregnant with their third child.

That, at least, is how Uppsala knew Abu Talb until May. The portrait drawn since then by Swedish police, who arrested him and three local men that month, grows more chilling daily.

It now includes bombings of American and Israeli targets in northern Europe, command of a security force for a terrorist leader, a network of relatives tied to European bombings and to terrorist acts in London and Israel and the nom de guerre Intiqam, meaning ``revenge.``

This month, in papers filed with Swedish legal officials here, Scottish police added another horror. They made Abu Talb the only publicly identified suspect ``in the murder or participation in the murder of 270 people,`` the Pan Am disaster.

Investigators believe Abu Talb was, at the least, an errand boy in a intricate plot to destroy Flight 103, say American and other officials.

The Scots searched his Uppsala home for supporting evidence this month. Last week, they held their first meeting with the suspect in a Swedish jail where he is being held on charges stemming from the European bombings.

Their questions are secret. But they probably centered on a seemingly innocuous event in Abu Talb`s emerging double-life: a trip to Malta during which he bought an armload of clothes two months before the Pan Am disaster.

Abu Talb`s location is a secret, and he cannot be interviewed. His lawyer, Sven-Erik Sjogren, dismisses speculation dealing with the plane crash. ``He (Abu Talb) says he is not guilty of anything to do with Lockerbie,`` Sjogren said in an interview. ``On this trip to Malta, in October, he was there for business.``

A Swedish official added: ``I don`t think they have enough evidence to arrest him. Maybe later.``

Still, what is known suggests that Abu Talb, and, it appears, other members of his extended family of Lebanese exiles, may be important figures in the case.

When Flight 103 plunged six miles into Lockerbie a year ago, Palestinian and Iranian terrorists were quickly suspected, but courtroom-quality evidence was scant. What remained of the bomb, the plane, passengers and luggage had been shredded by the craft`s violent decompression.

The inquiry mounted by Britain, U.S. and West Germany, where Flight 103 began at Frankfurt Airport, has covered 52 nations and 14,000 witnesses and wielded every trick in the forensics book.

When the plot was being hatched in the fall of 1988, Abu Talb and Jamila had lived in Uppsala for six years.

When not working at odd jobs or nurturing his businesses, Abu Talb passed the time with a Palestinian friend, Imandi Chaban, and his wife`s three brothers, Mahmoud, Mustafa and Mohammed al-Moghrabi.

Like several hundred other Palestinians, they were lured to Uppsala partly by Sweden`s liberal grants of asylum to political refugees.

According to a confidential Swedish police document, portions of which were made available here, Uppsala was home to a cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, General Command, a virulently anti-Israel terrorist group based in Damascus, Syria.

While not known to be members of the group, Abu Talb and his in-laws were bound to it by friendship and sympathy.

Abu Talb, whose several forged passports claim ages varying between 33 and 38 and hometowns of Beirut and Port Said, Egypt, is a former Egyptian army soldier trained in the Soviet Union. He joined the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1970 but soon quit to join a more radical group, the Palestine Popular Struggle Front, allied closely with the General Command and its leader, Ahmed Jabril.

In 1983, Abu Talb and his wife then, Jamila Moghrabi, entered Sweden; he used a false Moroccan passport and claimed to be a refugee.

Swedish authorities now call that a deception. Actually, they alleged in court last fall, Abu Talb and others used Uppsala as a base to build crude aluminum-dust bombs for a terror campaign across Europe.

In 1985 and 1986, four such bombs destroyed offices of Northwest Airlines in Copenhagen and Stockholm, an Amsterdam office of Israel`s airline, El Al, and a synagogue in Copenhagen. One person died and 27 were wounded.

A fifth bomb was destined for El Al`s Copenhagen office. But Mahmoud, who has become a witness against the others, says he had pangs of conscience and threw the device, wrapped in a bag with an Arabic newspaper, into a Copenhagen canal.